I know Christmas and the holidays decoration are red, stomach guess what we got?!!

Red Tape from Sacramento!

Yea, according to the Bureau for Private Post Secondary Education our SFBI program is not approved by them or up to the standard making me a “Public Offender”. So we have to shut down the school until they review our program and services we offer. I am so much in disbelief that I don’t want to fight for it. I already gave so much SFBI; my frustration is over the limit of my generosity.

If you believe SFBI was important for you email me the reasons why we should stay open that could make the Bureau change their minds. Since they ordered to shut down our webpage please cc the email to Michel@tmbbaking.com, in case they can get SFBI email. Whatever the outcome I get, the best time was running SFBI and seeing the joy of the people attending the classes and some evolution in the industry with great products.

Mid-week bread baking was successful as I found a way to work the Tartine recipe into a weekday schedule.
1. Feed starter at night
2. Leaven the next morning
3. Mix and shape the dough in the evening
4. Proof overnight
5. Back the following morning.

In total time, that’s 2.5 days. But since I was able to stack schedules, I baked two days in the row.

The first day, I baked 650g batards. Of the 6 batards made, only 2 were photo worthy. All 6 had nice rise and had a moist crumb.

The second day, I baked twelve 325g baguettes. While my standard recipe baguette recipe yielded physically larger loafs with better rise, the coloring and ear was more pronounced on the sourdoughs. Still can’t get the proper overlap of scores. This will require more work.

Because I made twelve baguettes, I needed to bake in two batches. For the first batch, the stone oven was a comfortable 475 degrees. By the second batch, the stone oven had dropped to 425 degrees. As you can imagine, two very different breads.

Rise, color, interior texture was less desirable on the lower temperature bread.

At 475 degrees:

At 425 degrees:

While this matters if you’re making baguettes to sell, for co-workers, the blond baguettes are still desirable. Here’s the dozen, packed and ready to go.

Ingredients:

280 g AP Flour

150 g sugar (plus 50 g for coating)

5 g salt

10 g baking powder

4 g vanilla extract

30 g melted butter

2 large eggs, beaten

170 ml of milk

Method:

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Spray donut pans

Mix flour, sugar,
salt and baking powder

Mix vanilla extract, butter, eggs and milk

Combine wet and dry ingredients, do not overmix

Pour into pan, filling 3/4 full

Bake for 8 minutes

Allow to cool until only slightly warm and then place donuts on wire rack

Dip each donut into sugar to coat, returning to rack to completely cool